https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/airbnb-picks-alibabas-qwen...
The fact that it's customer service means it's dealing with text entered by customers, which has privacy and other consequences.
So no, it's not "pretty inconsequential". Many more companies fit a profile like that than whatever arbitrary criteria you might have in mind for "consequential".
2020 - I was a mid level (L5) cloud consultant at AWS with only two years of total AWS experience and that was only at a small startup before then. Yet every customer took my (what in hindsight might not have been the best) advice all of the time without questioning it as long as it met their business goals. Just because I had @amazon.com as my email address.
Late 2023 - I was the subject matter expert in a niche of a niche in AWS that the customer focused on and it was still almost impossible to get someone to listen to a consultant from a shitty third rate consulting company.
2025 - I left the shitty consulting company last year after only a year and now work for one with a much better reputation and I have a better title “staff consultant”. I also play the game and be sure to mention that I’m former “AWS ProServe” when I’m doing introductions. Now people listen to me again.
All tech companies offering free services.
I’m not saying this to insult the technical capabilities of Uber. But it doesn’t have the economics that most tech companies have - high fixed costs and very low marginal costs. Uber has high marginal costs saving a little on inference isn’t going to make a difference.
Obviously, some US brands do not compete on price, but other than maybe Jeep and Tesla, those have a small market penetration.
All the clouds compete on price. Do you really think it is that differentiated? Google, Amazon and Microsoft all offer special deals to sign big companies up and globally too.
Microsoft doesn’t compete on price. Their major competitive advantage is Big Enterprise is already big into Microsoft and it’s much easier to get them to come onto Azure. They compete on price only when it comes to making Windows workloads Bd SQL Server cheaper than running on other providers.
AWS is the default choice for legacy reasons and it definitely has services an offerings that Google doesn’t have. I have never once been on a sales call where the sales person emphasizes that AWS is cheaper.
As far as GCP, they are so bad at evterprise sales, we never really looked at them as serious competition.
Sure AWS will throw credits in for migrations and professional services both internally and for third party partners. But no CFO is going to look at just the short term credits.
And most startups are just doing prompt engineering that will never go anywhere. The big companies will just throw a couple of developers at the feature and add it to their existing business.
Before that I spent 6 years working between 3 companies in health care in a tech lead role. I’m 100% sure that any of those companies would I have immediately questioned my judgment for suggesting DeepSeek if had been a thing.
Absolutely none of them would ever have touched DeepSeek.
Of course you’ll always have exceptions (government, military and etc.), but for private, winner will take it all.
Any kind of hardware that is somehow connected to the wired or wireless communication interfaces is much more dangerous than any software.
Backdoors embedded in such hardware devices may be impossible to identify before being activated by the reception of some "magic" signals from outside.
Companies just need to get to the “if” part first. That or they wash their hand by using a reseller that can use whatever it wants under the hood.
Although I did just check what regions AWS bedrock support Deepseek and their govcloud regions do not, so that's a good reason not to use it. Still, on prem on a segmented network, following CMMC, probably permissable
Well for non-American companies, you have the choice between Chinese models that don't send data home, and American ones that do, with both countries being more or less equally threatening.
I think if Mistral can just stay close enough to the race it will win many customers by not doing anything.
I'm not sure if technical people who don't understand this deserve the moniker technical in this context.
American companies chose to manufacturer in China and got all surprised Pikachu when China manufactured copies for themselves.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...
American intelligence has penetrated most information systems and at least as of 10 years ago, was leading all other nations in the level of sophistication and capability. Read Edward Snowden.
Rather, I'd say it speaks more about how deranged the post-snowden/anti-neocon figures have become, from critiquing creeping authoritarianism to functionality acting at the behest of an even more authoritarian regime. The funny thing is that behavior of deflection, moralizing and whataboutism is exactly the kind of behavior nationalists employ, not addressing arguments head on like the so-called "American nationalists".
Now on the HN frontpage: "Google Antigravity just wiped my hard drive"
Sure going to be hard to distinguish these Chinese models' "intentionally malicious actions"!
And the cherry on top:
- Written from my iPhone 16 Pro Max (Made in China)
Even if China did manage to embed software on the iPhone in Taiwan, it would soon hopefully be wiped since you usually end up updating the OS anyway as soon as you activate it.
You should remember that all iPhones had for several years an undetected hardware backdoor, until a couple of years ago, when independent researchers have found it and reported the Apple bugs as CVEs, so Apple was forced to fix the vulnerabilities.
The hardware backdoor consisted in the fact that writing some magic values to some supposedly unused addresses allowed the bypassing of all memory protections. The backdoor is likely to have consisted in some memory test registers, which are used during manufacturing, but which should be disabled before shipping the phone to customers, which Apple had not done.
This hardware backdoor, coupled with some bugs in a few Apple system libraries, allowed the knowledgeable attackers to send remotely an invisible message to the iPhone, which was able to take complete control over the iPhone, allowing the attacker to read any file and to record from cameras and microphones. A reboot of the iPhone removed the remote control, but then the attacker would immediately send another invisible message, regaining control.
There was no way to detect that the iPhone was remotely controlled. The backdoor was discovered only externally in the firewalls of a company, because the iPhones generated a suspiciously high amount of Internet traffic, without apparent causes.
This has been widely reported at the time and discussed on HN, but some people continue to be not aware about how little you can trust even major companies like Apple to deliver the right hardware.
The identity of the attackers who exploited this Apple hardware backdoor has not been revealed, but it is likely that they had needed the cooperation of Apple insiders, at least for access to secret Apple documentation, if not for intentionally ensuring that the hardware backdoor remained open.
Thus the fact that Apple publishes only incomplete technical documentation has helped only the attackers, allowing them to remain undiscovered for many years, against the interests of the Apple customers. Had the specifications of the test registers been public, someone would have quickly discovered that they had remained unprotected after production.
Therefore, for many years the iPhones of certain valuable targets had magically intercepted all their communications and they have sent them to an unknown country (due to the nature of some of the identified targets and the amount of resources required to carry the attacks, it has been speculated that the country could have been Israel, but no public evidence exists; a US TLA is the main plausible alternative, as some targets were Russians).
put another way, how do you propose to tell this subtle nefarious chinese sabotage you baselessly imply to be commonplace from the very real limitations of this technology in the first place?
This makes EU countries more reliable partners for cooperation than China. The same goes for the US from an European perspective, and even with everything going on over there it is still not remotely close.
All states are fundamentally adversaries because they have conflicting interests. To your point however, adversaries do indeed cooperate all the time.
Please don't engage in political battle here, including singling out a country for this kind of criticism. No matter how right you are or feel you are, it inevitably leads to geopolitical flamewar, which has happened here.
remember when the US bugged EU leader's phones, including Merkel from 2002 to 2013?
Please don't be snarky or condescending in HN comments. From the guidelines: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
There has never been a shred of evidence for security researchers, model analysis, benchmarks, etc that supports this.
It's a complete delusion in every sense.
Even when the technical people understood that, it would be too much of a political quagmire within their company when it became known to the higher ups. It just isn’t worth the political capital.
They would feel the same way about using xAI or maybe even Facebook models.